Interculturality in Language Teacher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

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The desire to develop more intercultural focused language teaching and learning has grown significantly and to date there has been a lot of attention given to theoretical issues around the nature of interculturality and what it means for language education, and also around the educational practices of intercultural language teaching and learning. This work has shown that moving to an intercultural perspective in language teaching and learning is complex and multifaceted, and often challenging for teachers. However, to date, there has been less focus on teacher education and how new teachers can be prepared to bring an intercultural perspective into the language classroom. This book is thus a very important contribution to the development of educational practice, and to intercultural oriented thinking in teacher education.
Moving towards an intercultural orientation in language education is actually a significant shift in educational thinking. Although culture has often been a focus in language education, and teachers and teacher educators have often considered the inclusion of cultural content to be synonymous with interculturality, recent work has shown that this is far from the case. Educational practice has been an inheritor of a deeply embedded ideology of culture that associates cultures with nations and languages in fixed and ultimately stereotypicalised ways. This ideology, which Bayart (2002) refers to as 'culturalism', constructs cultures and nations in terms of boundaries between 'us' and 'them' that create sets of differentiated national identities. The nation is seen as an entity that is distinct linguistically and culturally from other nations. Educational approaches have thus often presented the culture of the other in ways that focus on perceived differences and position language learners as analysts of these differences. This positioning reinforces the idea that 'we' and 'they' are different and sees the educational goal as knowing the differences that exist with national cultures

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Universidad del Valle
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 10 may 2023
• ISBN: 9786287523128

Varios autores

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CHAPTER 1

RE-SOURCING SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: THE CRITICAL INTERCULTURAL OPTION

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia &

Alexánder Ramírez Espinosa

We showed that we are united and that we, young people, are unstoppable

GRETA THUNBERG

At the time of this writing (November 2019), Colombia is being shaken by a national strike organized by different union organizations, rural social organizations, political indigenous organizations, and university members. This social movement emerged as a reaction to the government’s announced tax and pension reforms, but soon grew beyond these causes and became a catapult for people to express their general dissatisfaction with their living conditions. The situation in Colombia coincides with other protest movements in Latin American countries like Haiti, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador where protesters have flooded the streets, rallying against their government’s corruption, failure to reduce poverty and inequality, and politicians’ self-serving agendas. This state of upheaval seems to constitute a global trend. This year, similar civil unrest has led people in several countries like France, Lebanon, Netherlands, China (Hong Kong), Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, India, and Italy to claim for different living conditions. Although there are nuances on what has inspired these social movements, a common thread is inequality, corruption, political freedom, and climate change (BBC News, 2019; Kaplan & Akhtar, 2019). This geopolitical landscape entails two issues: people’s development of a sort of global social consciousness; and the central role that younger populations play in invigorating social protest movements. Now, how can this phenomenon be explained from the intercultural perspective? What does this geopolitical landscape have to do with language teacher education programs? And what is its place in this volume in particular?

One central pillar in interculturality is otherness. An examination of what this concept entails sheds light on the ontological reasons for these social movements to question the current geopolitical landscape. In Aspects of Alterity, Brian Treanor (2006) introduces a definition that revisits the common idea that otherness is a category that applies to people; in other words, that otherness solely refers to how we position ‘the other’ individual. The author posits the following:

We encounter otherness anytime we come up against or are confronted with our own limits and anytime events or others we have not foreseen surprise us. Anything beyond the ken of the self—either externally as in the case of other persons or the limitations of mortality, or internally as in the case of obscure motivations—confronts us with otherness. Thus, God, evil, death, identity, the unconscious, and other people are all examples of topics where the question of otherness is of central importance. (pp. 271-272)

Put in this way, otherness concerns the way we relate with ourselves and the external world on a daily basis: the ways we relate with illness, our desires and passions, our friends, acquaintances, people we do not know, animals and the environment. Our construction of otherness is highly ensconced within the ideological basis of the modern project and clashes with the multiplicity of postmodern identities that have surfaced from the interstices of the cracking wall of modernity. Treanor (2006) explains that what we call the postmodern era is characterized by the demise of what Lyotard (1984) termed Grand Narratives or frameworks of interpretations that helped individuals make sense of the world. Without them, people are confronted with ‘petit narratives’ which, in turn, lead to a multiplication of identity affiliations and thus, a ‘crisis’ of identity and legitimation (Treanor, 2006). A clear example of this is the proliferation of sociocultural groupings (e.g. urban tribes), new dependences, religions, and religious factions. Maffesoli (1996) uses the term ‘postmodern tribes’ to refer to this kind of sociality proper of our times. However, the diversification of ways of being in the world conflicts with the Grand Narratives that informed the modern project because "Grand Narratives will not tolerate otherness; their motto is ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’’’ (Treanor, 2006, p. 2).

The way otherness is approached today clearly resonates with the rhetoric of modernity. In the Western tradition otherness has been considered as something to be conquered (Treanor, 2006). It is in this manner that we have related ourselves with our consciousness if we think of expressions such as ‘the conquest of reason;’ one of the major pillars of modern rationality. This ideology also applies to how we have related with nature, which explains why our understanding of progress and development spins around the control of our natural environment, leading to obliteration of the ecological balance of our planet. In literature, for example, classic novels published between the 16th and 20th Century like Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Tarzan of the Apes are archetypes of the modern project because they place the human being at the center and show him conquering, dominating, and controlling nature. The European colonial project in Asia, America, and Africa in the 15th Century also obeys the logic of conquest, destruction, and invisibilization of otherness. In imposing the idea of a universal culture, framed within the principles of Cartesian dualism, the cult of reason, anthropocentrism, the Judeo-Christian creed, and a logocentric view –all tenets of modernity–, the colonizers repressed the otherness of those colonized by vanishing their ways of imagining, meaning making, and, in general, by stripping them from any form of cultural and symbolic production (Quijano, 1992).

Historically there has been an epistemological tendency to understand the ‘other’ that is new to a community by confronting it to current and accepted frameworks of interpretation and making it fit. The period of colonial domination (e.g., the colonization of the American continent) and the recent imperialist and expansionist project of the supposed values of the West (e.g., democracy) continue to show that we approach the encounter with otherness as an opportunity to turn something unknown into something known, that is, We are much more likely to alter a new phenomenon to fit the mosaic of our worldview than we are to abandon our worldview because a new phenomenon does not fit (Treanor, 2006, p. 4). Ultimately, this approach to otherness has strengthened ethnocentric and anthropocentric views which manifest in processes of discriminatory and unequal treatment at the inter and intracultural as well as the inter and intra-species level.

While the world is experiencing a postmodern condition of superdiversity (Vertobec, 2007), the modern rationality still dominates the way we understand difference and otherness. This paradox in part explains the reasons behind worldwide protests about gender, ethnic, racial, economic, social and cultural inequality and climate change. It is a clash between those who cling to the Grand Narratives of cultural, class and ethnic homogeneity and those who see the need for a change in the way they are othered. Current evils of the world related with inequality, corruption, political freedom and climate change index views of an ‘other’ that deserves less because they do not fit neatly into the forms of life and semiotic systems that people in power or dominant groups inhabit. Social movement protests are an example of the awareness of the multiplicity of otherness and the need to claim the right to belong in societies where diverse ways of being and staying in the lifeworld are possible. Despite the well-spread hazards of globalization, as a social and cultural phenomenon it has helped us realize that the proclaimed universality of human needs, moral principles, knowledge, semiotic resources, and values is limited and limiting. The awareness that social movements generate are starting points to develop pluriversal views that move from Anglo-Eurocentric epistemologies, and verbocentric and anthropocentric narratives toward the recognition of other epistemological genealogies, other semiotic resources, and other intersubjectivities and biocentric narratives (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 1992; Walsh, 2007). The intercultural indigenous movements in Latin America are a clear example that there could be other epistemic matrices, forms of consciousness, forms of socio-political organization, and ways of coexistence with nature (De La Cadena, 2015; Walsh, 2009, 2011).

Young people such as Greta Thunberg, a teenage environmental activist whom we cite in our epigraph, participating in or leading social movements are sending a message to older generations and the youth that are still complacent with the current state of affairs. These young leaders belong to a generation that is not necessarily getting all their education from traditional schooling and have developed other sensitivities and understandings toward the social and natural world. Scholars studying youth political participation (e.g., Pickard, 2019; Pickard & Bessant, 2018; Taft, 2019) explain that younger populations are exercising citizenship differently, by designing and embodying new, creative, and authentic forms of political agency. Concerning education, younger generations are demanding a type of education that is more attuned with the lifeworld they are inhabiting; a lifeworld where unstable truths are more accepted, where diversity and expression of otherness at the corporeal, sexual, social, religious, cultural, ethical, political, ethnic and racial levels are acceptable; a lifeworld where the human community has been expanded to one that includes non-human beings (Haraway, 2016) –a move from anthropocentrism to biocentrism (Duque, 2019). It seems as though young people are taking a more critical and hopeful stance, and it may be the underlying message they are sending to educators through these worldwide protest movements.

THE UNDERLYING MESSAGE FOR EDUCATION: A CRITICAL STANCE

So, what are social movement protests around the world telling education stakeholders? Perhaps they represent an invitation to think of the role of education in perpetuating or decimating social, cultural, political, and environmental inequality. Their message compels us to consider other valid categories of otherness beyond our particular zones of comfort. They are as well telling us that we must strive to change the narrative through which dominant groups have othered us. It is clear that education has been attending to its responsibility partially, and that a more critical lens should inform curriculum planning and teaching methodologies. A critical perspective poses great challenges to educational systems that are grounded in the technical rationality inherited from modernity, characterized by the objectification of ‘the other’ individual, animal, environment. Western education has, in the name of science, atomized knowledge, stripping it from its historical and socio-cultural roots and has positioned students as thinking beings rather than feeling-thinking human beings (Fals Borda & Moncayo Cruz, 2009).

These social movements show stakeholders that when people openly express their diverse ways of being, living, feeling, wanting, needing, and thinking, they open the doors for recognition of otherness. In this regard, Guilherme (2019, citing Blommaert, 2015) explains that "recognition as (identity X) is a socially regimented effect that demands recognizability within a frame of intersubjectivity" (p. 6). She further explains that if recognition requires recognizability, then it is fair play to make difference evident without losing sight of synchronic and diachronic processes that inform sociocultural difference as well as dominant regimes of truth. We deem this a strong message sent to educators who are invited to bring forth their identities and let students deploy their diversity. In the context of teacher education, such a message acquires particular primacy since teacher education programs are instrumental in helping future teachers co-construct the necessary semiotic resources (see Chapter 2 in this volume) to deal with the multifarious expressions of otherness in classrooms. In this volume our assumption is that a critical intercultural perspective constitutes a viable approach to ground teacher education, and in particular, foreign/second language education (Guilherme & Souza, 2019). Recognizing otherness is a first important leap in learning to live together harmoniously, nonetheless, a critical stance should be taken if we aim for transformation. This train of thought resonates with the spirit of this volume in that it is threaded around the critical intercultural perspective and its role in diversifying teacher education in terms of redefining conceptual frameworks (Chapter 2), methodologies and strategies (Chapter 3), views of students as social subjects (Chapter 4), categories of gender and sexual identity (Chapter 5), the role of pedagogical material (Chapter 6), and media of instruction (Chapter 7).

TEACHER EDUCATION: SHIFTS AND CHALLENGES

Second/foreign language teacher education (S/FLTE) refers to a process that encompasses the preparation –training and education– of L2 teachers (Wright, 2010, p. 260). The area has taken different trajectories in recent decades (Freeman, 2009; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010). Freeman (2009) presents an overview of how S/FLTE has broadened its scope. The author explains that up to the 1970s, teacher education programs focused on learning about language content, learners, SLA, and classroom methodologies. A different orientation gained ground during the 80s wherein the focus was the teacher and the process of professional development. The teacher was seen as a learner who developed beyond transmitted knowledge and skills passed on in initial teacher training programs. Teacher learning stemmed from other spaces of teacher activity including the classroom, non-formal settings or experiences, and formally instructed settings like postgraduate courses. The scope of teacher education was remarkably redefined during the 1990s. The period was marked by an interest in research and conceptualization of teachers’ knowledge base, teacher learning, and other concepts that helped reshape and expand the boundaries of the field. Influenced by the sociocultural perspective (Johnson, 2009a), the field experienced in the 2000s an emphasis on operational questions that regarded dimensions such as teacher identity, socialization, and situations of practice. As Freeman (2009) clarifies,

professional learning processes were redefined in a broader sense to include not only what happened in instructed teacher-training environments, but also the wider influences of socialization evident in individual development. These processes were refocused as much on the evolution of participants’ professional identities… as on the ways in which they learned new knowledge or ways of doing in the classrooms. (p. 15)

Freeman’s (2009) insights converge with other scholars’ reflections about issues that continue to concern stakeholders in teacher education programs (Burns & Richards, 2009; Farrell, 2015; Johnson, 2006, 2009b; Kanakri, 2017; Kumaravadivelu, 2012; Wright, 2010). These issues comprise:

•the level and status of the profession in ELT,

•the knowledge base of professionals in the field,

•the nature of teacher learning or how teachers develop a ‘practitioner knowledge,’

•the role of context in affording teachers learning,

•the role of teacher cognition or the personal theories, representations, and beliefs of teachers in teaching practice and identity shaping,

•the development of teacher identity,

•the reconceptualization of the teaching practice and the act of learning,

•the question of accountability of teacher education programs,

•the different approaches to investigate phenomena in S/FLTE,

•the preparation of teachers for multilingual and multicultural ESL/EFL classrooms,

•the gap between teacher preparation program contents and novice teachers’ actual classroom realities,

•the influence of critical theories and critical pedagogies in second/foreign language teacher education,

•the preparation of teachers for the challenges inherent in globalization and the digital age.

Authors like Farrell (2015, 2016), Wright (2010) and Kanakri (2017) pinpoint that one of the greatest challenges of S/FLTE is to bridge the gap between the type of education novice teachers receive and the realities they face in the language classroom when they go into the job market. This is also related to teacher education programs’ slow appropriation of conceptual developments in the field. In a state-of-the-art article, Wright (2010) concludes that,

what will become clear from the review of a fairly wide selection of accounts of practice, is that the uptake of new conceptualisations of SLTE has not, in the daily reality of SLTE programmes, kept pace with the valuable theoretical consolidation that has been achieved… What we encounter, therefore, is an uneven uptake of new ideas in SLTE, and the slow emergence of research procedures in SLTE which reflect the nature of the new knowledge base, and in particular, the process of how teachers learn teaching. (p. 260)

S/FLTE has moved from a perspective in which teacher learning was deemed as a cognitive process in which content and procedural knowledge were transferred to teachers who, in turn, were supposed to transform it into practice. Influenced by sociocultural principles, teachers are now more empowered to become inquirers and to theorize practice, becoming producers of knowledge rather than consumers (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). By adopting elements from sociocultural theories, S/FLTE has opened new avenues of exploration about teachers’ identity construction, the place of context, and the role of classroom interaction and social activity in mediating teacher learning and identity construction (Johnson, 2006; 2009a; Johnson & Golombek, 2011).

Although still a central dimension, the knowledge base of S/FLTE has been subject to constant reconceptualization (Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 2009b; Tarone & Allwright, 2005). Traditionally, teacher education programs have included within this dimension the components of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, that is to say, the what to teach and the how to teach it. The discussion about what should be the knowledge base of language teachers is still contentious, although, different components have been outlined (Colton & Sparks-Langer, 1993; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 2009b; Johnston & Goettsch, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2012; Pineda, 2002; Richards, 1994; Tsui, 2003; Wallace, 1999; Wright, 2010). More recently, Johnson (2009b) has indicated that knowledge base in teacher education programs regards three broad areas:

1) the content of L2 teacher education programs, or what teachers need to know; 2) the pedagogies that are taught in L2 teacher education program, or how L2 teachers should teach; 3) the institutional forms of delivery through which both the contents and pedagogies are learned, or how L2 teachers learn to teach. (p. 21)

Of particular noteworthiness is the latter dimension because it evokes dialogic and chronotropic dimensions (Bakhtin, 1981) to understand teachers’ knowledge base development.

Thinking of teachers’ knowledge base as being complemented, shaped by the polyphony of voices present in dialogic encounters in specific chronotropic or time-space conditions helps understand the dynamic, situated, and intersubjective nature of the teacher’s knowledge base construction. In fact, this perspective is in line with research conducted by one of the authors (Álvarez Valencia, 2009) about in-service teachers’ knowledge base. In discussing their construction and the sources of knowledge base, teachers acknowledged that it is an ongoing process and is composed of all the ‘footprints’ left by their family, previous teachers, and schooling experiences. As mentioned above (Farrell, 2015; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010), one typical roadblock of teachers’ practice is the gap between theory and practice. In order to cope with this shortcoming, teachers think of teaching as the deployment of different knowledges that are constructed and enacted product of ‘decision-making within a polyphonic interaction.’ Teaching is represented through the metaphor of an orchestra that plays depending on its audience:

The music of an orchestra is a polyphony of sounds which needs to establish a dialogue among its different instruments. Likewise, we can say that the knowledge used in a classroom is made up of a polyphony of voices or sources of knowledge that establishes a dialogic interaction and constitutes the teaching activity. This dialogic interaction entails a reflective teaching exercise which, according to Richards and Lockhart (1994), will guide teachers’ decision-making processes in their teaching settings. (Álvarez Valencia, 2009, p. 91)

Accordingly, the task of a teacher is searching how to play (how to teach) in a way that meets the needs of their students and the characteristics of their milieu. It is in this dialogic interaction, combined with the teachers’ spatiotemporal resonances of their previous personal and work experiences, their schooling, their own beliefs and theories, and professional training, that teacher learning occurs. However, although this study as well as other works on teacher’s knowledge base and S/FLTE acknowledges the role of the local context and broader macro contextual structures (sociopolitical, sociohistorical, and socioeconomic contexts) in informing teacher education curricular planning (Farrell, 2016; Gurmit & Richards, 2006; Johnson, 2009a,b; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010), we argue for a more explicit and emphatic inclusion of the critical dimension in S/FLTE, framed within the intercultural orientation.

A CRITICAL INTERCULTURAL ORIENTATION IN SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

We position ourselves within a critical intercultural perspective to suggest that the gap mentioned above between teacher education programs and the realities teachers face upon graduation is further heightened by the absence of an intercultural perspective that prepares future teachers for contexts of superdiversity, social inequality, and